Skip to content
50% OFF $299 $599
Lock in
§ 1.1.6 ARTICLE
Published Verified Every 6 weeks Sources 5 named Authored by SquareRank Team

ChatGPT · § 1.1.6 · Reference

Squarespace × ChatGPT Optimisation Checklist

Twenty-two items in four groups — Crawlers, Schema, Content, Measurement — each copy-paste codable from a Squarespace 7.1 site. Ship one group per session and the whole list takes about three focused hours. The checklist captures the operational version of the five-step install the cluster hub walks through in narrative form.

This is the reference page, not the explainer. Each item is one action with a verification step. The leaves linked from each group cover the why and the how in depth; this page is the do-it list you keep open while you work. Tick items in your own copy or fork the list as a Notion / Linear / Trello board.

How to use this checklist

Work through the groups in order — Crawlers first because nothing else matters if OpenAI's bots cannot reach your site; Schema second because it is the foundation everything compounds on; Content third because that is where the most labour lives; Measurement fourth because it is the loop that tells you whether the first three are working. Each item has a verification step. Tick an item only when the verification passes. Most owners need to fix three to seven items on a first pass; sites that have been live for years and never touched the AI-search layer typically have fourteen or more open.

The checklist assumes Business plan or above. The Code Injection items require it. On Personal plan, the schema and code-injection items are not reachable inside Squarespace — the workaround is either an upgrade or a platform migration, neither of which fit on a checklist. The rest of the items (Crawlers panel, Content shape, AI Visibility tool, manual tracking) work on any plan.

Group 1 — Crawlers (5 items)

The five crawler-layer items are the cheapest wins in the whole list. Total time on a Squarespace site is about ten minutes including verification. Item 1 is the panel check; items 2-4 are the per-bot live tests with curl; item 5 is the audit for downstream blockers. If item 1 reveals the AI exclusion box is on, fixing it is the single highest-impact change you can make on the entire list.

  • 01. AI exclusion box unchecked. Settings → Crawlers. Confirm "Block known artificial intelligence crawlers" is unchecked. The default is unchecked2; fix if not. Verify: open yoursite.com/robots.txt and confirm GPTBot is not in a Disallow block.
  • 02. GPTBot reaches the homepage. Run the curl test with the GPTBot user-agent. Expect 200 OK. Verify: the response headers should look identical to a regular browser GET.
  • 03. OAI-SearchBot reaches the homepage. Run the curl test with the OAI-SearchBot user-agent1. This is the bot that decides ChatGPT Search citations. Expect 200 OK.
  • 04. ChatGPT-User reaches the homepage. Run the curl test with the ChatGPT-User user-agent. ChatGPT-User does not respect robots.txt — a 403 here indicates a downstream block, not a panel setting.
  • 05. No noai/noindex X-Robots-Tag headers. Open browser dev tools, load any citation-target page, inspect response headers. Confirm no X-Robots-Tag header contains noai, noindex, or per-bot directives that would override the panel.
bash The five-minute crawler verification — three curl one-liners 
 # GPTBot — training crawler
curl -I -A "Mozilla/5.0 ... GPTBot/1.3; +https://openai.com/gptbot" https://yoursite.com/ # OAI-SearchBot — ChatGPT Search index (most important)
curl -I -A "Mozilla/5.0 ... OAI-SearchBot/1.3; +https://openai.com/searchbot" https://yoursite.com/ # ChatGPT-User — live, user-initiated fetch
curl -I -A "Mozilla/5.0 ... ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot" https://yoursite.com/

Full walkthrough lives in the unblock-GPTBot leaf and the ChatGPT-User vs GPTBot leaf.

Group 2 — Schema (6 items)

The schema-layer items require Code Injection on Business plan or above. Total time on a fresh site is about forty-five minutes including JSON-LD authoring and validation. Item 6 is the foundation — Article schema on every editorial page; item 7 is entity wiring; items 8-9 cover the organisation and the founder; items 10-11 cover the harder cases (LocalBusiness, Product). Validate every block in Google's Rich Results Test before moving on.

  • 06. Article schema on every editorial page. Inject JSON-LD with @type: Article, headline, datePublished, dateModified, author (Person, URL pointing at /founder/), publisher (Organization)4. Verify: Rich Results Test passes with zero errors.
  • 07. Person schema on /founder/. Inject Person JSON-LD with name, jobTitle, url, and sameAs array of social profile URLs. Verify: Rich Results Test passes.
  • 08. Organization schema on /. Inject Organization JSON-LD on the homepage with name, url, logo, and sameAs. Verify: Rich Results Test passes.
  • 09. BreadcrumbList on every page. The Article layout component or a per-page injection. Verify: the page has visible breadcrumbs in the rendered DOM and the JSON-LD reflects them.
  • 10. LocalBusiness or Service schema where applicable. Service-area businesses inject LocalBusiness with address, geo, openingHours; productised services inject Service with provider and areaServed. Verify: Rich Results Test passes.
  • 11. Supplemental Product schema on Commerce pages. Squarespace's auto-emitted Product markup is basic. Inject supplemental brand, sku, and explicit Offer fields per the shopping leaf. Verify: Rich Results Test reports zero conflicts with the auto-emitted block.

Group 3 — Content (7 items)

The content-layer items are the largest time investment. Per-page, the rewrite to add 134-167 word leads, named-source citations, and clean heading hierarchy takes about an hour. The good news is the work is durable — pages restructured for AI citation also rank better in Google and AI Overviews, so the labour pays into multiple surfaces at once. Prioritise your top five trafficked editorial pages and your homepage; sweep the rest over time.

  • 12. 134-167 word bolded lead under every H2. Each section opens with a self-contained answer5. Bold it. Aim for the centre of the band. Verify: word-count the leads on a representative page.
  • 13. 2+ named sources per editorial page. Replace vague attribution with publisher + date inline. Verify: count named publishers in a random page; should be 2 or more.
  • 14. 1+ specific statistic per major section. Replace adjectives with numbers where you have them; cite the source. Verify: grep your top pages for numerical claims and check each has an adjacent citation.
  • 15. Clean H1/H2/H3 hierarchy. One H1, H2 for sections, H3 for sub-points. Use the Code Injection patch on regular pages where 7.1's section-based layout fragments hierarchy. Verify: view-source on a representative page, confirm one H1.
  • 16. 2-5 contextual internal links per 1,000 words. Link to cluster hub, pillar, sibling pages. Avoid orphan pages. Verify: grep for internal links per page; calibrate to word count.
  • 17. Date and verified-by metadata visible. Pages declare publishedISO and modifiedISO in the Article layout. Surface a "verified every 6 weeks" line in the meta strip. Verify: meta strip renders the dates and verification cadence.
  • 18. No promotional adjectives in body copy. Strip "powerful", "robust", "seamless", "leveraging", "intricate", "multifaceted". AI engines deprioritise overtly promotional prose. Verify: grep your top page for the banned vocabulary; zero hits is the target.

Group 4 — Measurement (4 items)

The measurement-layer items close the loop. Without them you ship optimisations into the dark; with them you see what is working and where the next iteration should focus. Total setup time is about thirty minutes if you already have GA4 installed. The manual tracking spreadsheet is the slow accrual layer — small weekly investment, payoff in the trend lines after eight to twelve weeks.

  • 19. GA4 AI Search channel grouping live. Admin → Data display → Channel groups. Regex on Session source: chatgpt\.com|perplexity\.ai|claude\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com. Verify: at least one session lands in the AI Search channel.
  • 20. Squarespace AI Visibility tool populated. Add 5-10 branded and 5-10 non-branded prompts in the SEO panel. Plan-dependent test cadence: every 14 days on Core/Business, every 7 on Plus and above3. Verify: the panel shows a result for each prompt.
  • 21. Weekly manual tracking spreadsheet. 10-15 priority queries logged each Friday with citation appearance Y/N and a screenshot. Verify: the sheet has at least four weeks of data.
  • 22. Quarterly source manifest re-verification. Every six weeks, walk through your top pages' source manifests and confirm each cited URL still loads and still contains the claim attributed. Replace dead links and outdated statistics. Verify: last-verified date in the manifest matches a recent walk-through date.

What done looks like

5+

ChatGPT Search citations per month on category queries after 90 days of the install.

Squarespace Help · 2026
10+

branded prompts where AI Visibility panel reports a mention after the schema layer ships.

Squarespace Help · 2026
0

Rich Results Test errors across every editorial and product page on the site.

Schema.org · 2026-Q1

Keep reading · § 1.1.6